Wonderful 101 Review

I have put a good chunk of time into Wonderful 101 thus far and have been enjoying it immensely. There's already so much to do in this game and I'm about a quarter of the way through my first playthrough. I've been a fan of Platinum Games for as long as they've been Platinum Games (and a bit before that) and this was one of the titles that originally sold me on the Wii U. Sadly I have had to wait a good half year for it to come out, but it's definitely been worth the wait.

The basis of the game is that you control a group of superheroes that span the world over called the Centinels, though they are often referred to as Wonderful Ones. That is where the title of the game comes from, the Wonderful 101 (there's actually only 100 of them, the 101st is you of course) and they are quite the handful of hilarious stereotypes and bizarre heroes, Wonder Toilet being my favorite so far. They have banded together to stop the evil GEATHJERK who want to take over the world, destroy the world, or just do the usual bad guy thing. The story is fairly nonsensical but the dialogue is extremely comical and I did enjoy the cutscenes just as I couldn't wait to hear what pretty much anyone was going to say next.

The combat of course is the meat of it, as is the case with games from Platinum and early on it seems pretty simple, but as you add more of the core heroes, more combat options open up. Once you have more combat options like Wonder Green's gun or Wonder Pink's whip, you can start to chain even more combos together and things start to get pretty crazy. You can use the touch screen on the gamepad to make the shapes to transform your heroes, or you can use the right thumbstick to morph your group of crime fighters. I found that the thumbstick was pretty good for the most part and a bit faster than using the touch screen, especially when you are fighting dozens of baddies. Things got a bit frustrating from time to time when things didn't respond the way I had hoped but all in all it handles things pretty well. There are also times when you go into locations and use the gamepad as a second screen, which is pretty keen, and there are a number of moments where the game turns into a shooter or some other mini-game or quick time event occurs, which helps to break up the combo mashing.

All in all the style of the game, the controls, and the ridiculous but hilarious story have made me enjoy this game quite a bit. I'm definitely looking forward to my next playthrough on the next difficulty setting and this is a must own for Wii U owners.

Score: B+